Off-target `Siege' but singers' aim is true

Critic's Corner//Opera

Opera Review

October 16, 2006|By Tim Smith | Tim Smith,sun music critic

Opera-goers are used to time travel. These days, conceptual directors think nothing of moving characters from 18th-century Seville in a Mozart opera to, say, Trump Tower. Or 19th-century Italian peasants in a Donizetti comedy to a 1950s American diner. Or mythological figures in Wagner epics to the Victorian era and even outer space.

A case of backward motion, however, is something of a rarity. And, it's something of a misstep in the Baltimore Opera Company's valiant, but uneven, production of a neglected Rossini work, The Siege of Corinth. Here, a martial and marital conflict between 15th- century Greeks and Turks has been transported to vaguely earlier eras.